Anita Hecht, Life History Services Recording Date: July 9, 2011 Place: Boston, Massachusetts

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY An Oral History Interview with ROBERT L. KUTTNER Interviewer: .Anita Hecht, Life History Services Recording Date: July 9, 2011 Place: Boston, Massachusetts. Length: 1 hour 40 minutes Robert Kuttner was raised in New York City and graduated from Oberlin College in 1965 before earning his M.S. degree from the University of California. He then worked for journalist I.F. Stone and as a legislative assistant for the anti-war Congressman William Fitts Ryan. Kuttner also served as Washington bureau chief for Pacifica Radio and worked as a journalist for the Village Voice, the liberal Catholic weekly, Commonweal, and The Washington Post. When Sen. William Proxmire became the new chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban .Affairs, Kuttner worked with Sen. Proxmire's staff as chief investigator. He researched foreign bribery by U.S. corporations, leading to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; mortgage redlining, leading to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Kuttner recalls that "Sen. Proxmire was that rarest of political creatures, a tight-money populist. He was as tough on the excesses of capitalism as any member of the House or Senate. He believed that powerful industries needed to be regulated in the public interest. But he was just as tough on government excess." "ranscript 1 Proxmire Oral History Project PROJECT NAME: PROXMIRE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Verbatim Interview Transcript NARRATOR: ROBERT L. KUTTNER INTERVIEWER: Anita Hecht INTERVIEW DATE: June 9,2011 INTERVIEW LOCATION: Boston, Massachusetts INTERVIEW LENGTH: Approximately 1 Hour, 40 Minutes KEY: RK Robert Kuttner BP Bill Proxmire HMDA Home Mortgage Disclosure Act CRA Community Reinvestment Act RESPA Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act SUBJECT INDEX HOUR1 Hour 1/00:00 RK's Family/Work History Early Interest in Journalism/Politics Hour 1/10:00 Merging Journalism and Politics Impact of Vietnam War RK's Knowledge of BP Beginning Work for BP RK's Impressions of BP Hour 1/21:00 Banking Lobby vs. Banking Committee BP's Refusal to Take Special Interest Money Redlining Issue Hour 1/30:45 Community Group's Involvement with Redlining Opposition to and Passage of HMDA Hour 1/40:00 BP's Attributes as Senator Effect of HMDA Opposition to and Passage of CRA Importance of Grassroots Lobbying Effect of CRA -crept Hour 1/50:20 Foreign Corporate Bribery Investigation BP's Staffs Response to Legislative Successes HOUR 2 Hour 2/00:00 BP's Views on Bank Regulation RESPA Legislation Renegotiation Board Hour 2/10:35 Golden Fleece Awards BP's Attributes as Boss BP's Simplistic Lifestyle Hour 2/20:00 Creation of the National Neighborhood Reinvestment Corp. Senators' Perception of BP BP's Quirkiness/Work Ethic BP's Influence on RK Hour 2/30:25 RK's Disagreement with BP on Glass-Steagall BP's Influence on RK's Post-Senate Career BP's Legacy Speculation as to BP in Today's Political Climate Robert Kuttner Interview Transcript HOUR1 Hour 1/00:00 RK Family/Work History, Early Interest in Journalism/Politics The date is June $ in the year 2011. My name is Anita Hecht and I have the great pleasure and honor of interviewing Bob Kuttner on behalf of the William Proxmire Oral History Project of the Wisconsin Historical Society. And we find ourselves in Bob's beautiful home here in Boston on Beacon Hill, Massachusetts. So thankyoufor agreeing to participate. You're most welcome. So, just in the interest of learning a little bit about the people who surrounded Bill Proxmire, let's start with your date and place of birth. I was born in New York City, April 17th, 1943. And can you tell me just a little about your family history? Sure. My parents were of the generation that faced some hardship during the Depression. My mother's family had grown up upper middle class. My father's family had grown up middle middle class and then my mother's family lost everything in the Depression. They moved to New York, where my mother met my father. My mother's family had been from Boston. My father's Robert Kuttner Interview Transcript 4 Proxmire family was from New York. And he never got a great deal of traction in the '30s. They got married in 1935. He was drafted shortly after I was born. They deferred his basic training for a few months. And then he went off to basic training and shipped out late in 1943, was in a division that was in France just after the Normandy invasion. He was taken prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge, came back, barely survived the war, and then lived another few years - died when I was only nine. My mother remarried. My parents, after the war, had moved from the Bronx to Scarsdale for the schools. For your benefit? For my benefit. And [I] probably grew up in the most modest house in Scarsdale that happened to be in the Scarsdale school district. So that gave me a sense of class at an early age. And I think the combination of my mother having lost everything in the Depression when she was a young woman, and my father never having gotten traction in his career, and the fact that the VA [United States Veterans Administration, now Department of Veterans Affairs] was a word that was used in my house a lot when I was a little kid because when my father was sick, he was in a VA hospital; and Social Security was a word that was used in my house a lot because my mother managed to stay middle class after my father died, thanks to veterans benefits and social security survivor benefits - and so I was - even though they were not particularly political, they were of the Roosevelt era - and so I was primed to grow up as something of a liberal. And then being a lower middle class kid in a rich town - that kind of primed me to have a political sensibility about economic injustice and class. And then I went off to Oberlin in 1961 and, of course, Robert Kuttner Interview Transcript 5 Proxmire Oberlin has a whole history as a politically radical, in the best sense of the word, institution, and this was the beginning of the Vietnam War years. So you graduated from a public high school? I graduated from Scarsdale High School in '61 and then entered Oberlin - graduated from there at c65. And that was the - what I like to think of as the sweet, idealistic part of the '60s, before it all went into acid trips and nihilism. So I guess my formation as a young man was as a, you know, kind of a left liberal, but a hopeful, idealistic left liberal. And I went on to Berkeley to get a graduate degree and was very uncomfortable with the kind of nihilism of some of the radicalism at Berkeley. I was always much more comfortable being on the left edge of mainstream politics rather than being on the right edge of far left politics. And that's where my politics have always been. So I went from there to -1 worked for I.F. Stone, the great, independent journalist. And then I took a job with one of the first anti-war congressmen, William Fitts Ryan from New York - that's Fitts - F-I-T-T-S. And then went to work for Pacifica, which was the precursor to National Public Radio. The Pacifica Foundation invented listener supported radio in the '40s. And I set up their Washington bureau. I worked for WBAI, which was their New York station, as the program director and then the general manager. Can I ask you a few questions before we go on? Sure. Robert Kuttner Interview Transcript 6 Proxmire You said that your family wasn't necessarily political, but did you follow politics as you were in high school? I'm just thinking about the McCarthy era. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I did debate - very much so. But I sort of - it was not one of those families that was politically self-conscious or all that intellectual. That is to say there were not yards and yards of bookshelves of serious books. There were Reader's Digest condensed books. And they were bright people, but neither one graduated college. And so when you finished high school in '61 and you went on to Oberlin — Yep. What kinds of goals or hopes did you have for yourself? Did you already see yourself going somehow into government, politics, journalism? I think I was torn between getting a doctorate and being a college professor or being a journalist. And after one year at Berkeley in a doctoral program - you know, in the midst of all kinds of social chaos - it felt too rarified and too boring, too arcane, to go on for a doctorate. And so I decided I would do what I did as ajournalist, but as an e/Tgoge journalist, if you will, not in a kind of "nothing but the facts, ma'am" journalist. And I think by the time I was twenty-two or twenty-three, both my politics and my vocation were pretty well set. And what's interesting about my years with Proxmire - I mean, I spent probably a total of five years being other than a journalist, three of them with Proxmire, one of them working for a Member of the House - at the Robert Kuttner Interview Transcript 1 Proxmire time, I kind of viewed that as a sabbatical from j ournalism, something that would round out my knowledge about how politics worked, something interesting to do.

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